Big data is fast becoming a big player in the health care sector – and the artificial intelligence capabilities it creates could become a $28 billion market by 2025.

"Artificial intelligence in the health care sector has maximum usage in the personal health and nursing assistant application,” Rishabh Sinha, an analyst at BIS Research, stated, adding that, “the adoption of personal health and nursing assistants has witnessed a robust growth, over recent years. Presently, the people are more focused on utilizing their precious time doing something productive rather than wasting it in the hospitals waiting for their turn. The personal health and nursing assistants support the patients by analyzing their historical medical reports and present conditions."

In its new report, BIS Research estimates that the artificial intelligence market in the space will grow at a CAGR of 45.1 percent, driven not only by assistant-level applications, but also by the insatiable thirst for data from the trend to evidence-based medicine, and the need to keep costs down by applying best practices derived from information analysis.

This combines with an increasing output of data from ever more pervasive and complex diagnostic tools from the “fitbit” level of personal health data collection to increasingly sophisticated large diagnostic imaging machines.

In fact, BIS is not the only one to see huge growth in the AI-health care space.

In August, Bipin Thomas reported in HealthCare Business News that Accenture estimates peg the increase even higher.

By 2026, he noted, a number of sectors within health care will combine to hit a total of about $150 billion, including:

-Robot-assisted surgery — $40 billion.
-Virtual nursing assistants — $20 billion.
-Administrative workflow assistance — $18 billion.
-Fraud detection — $17 billion.
-Dosage error reduction — $16 billion.
-Connected machines — $14 billion.
-Clinical trial participant identifier — $13 billion.
-Preliminary diagnosis — $5 billion.
-Automated image diagnosis — $3 billion.
-Cybersecurity — $2 billion.

Robot-assisted surgery coming in first, specifically for orthopedic surgery, he argued, will bump current leader, virtual assistants, to number 2.

“The AI technology incorporates data from actual surgical experiences to inform new, improved techniques and insights,” he explained.

Faced with this tsunami of health data, artificial intelligence will be needed to pull the wheat from the chaff, as the task of sifting through all this information for a given patient begins to overwhelm the ability of human diagnosticians to keep up. This is especially true, argued Thomas, as there is a global shortage of 7 million physicians, nurses and other health workers worldwide, and the problem is increasing.

AI can not only assist in training but can fill some of that gap, he argued. “AI is not an innovation coming down the pike,” he stated, “it’s here. Those who seize the AI opportunity and embrace these applications to deliver high-quality, cost-effective care will be the ones to leapfrog competitors.”

Numerous companies are stepping up to meet the challenge – and potentially profit from the opportunity. These include a number of the biggest global firms.

IBM's Watson, is now being applied to oncology and cancer.

IBM is also teaming with CVS Health to apply AI to the treatment of chronic disease, as well as working with Johnson & Johnson in drug development.

Microsoft has paired up with Scopis for its Holographic Navigation Platform with integrated Microsoft HoloLens technology. The platform is intended for use during open and minimally-invasive spinal procedures.

“Integrating mixed-reality tools into surgery is a huge technological advancement toward enhancing a surgeon’s vision and may provide greater benefits to patients,” Christian Woiciechowsky, chief of the Spinal Surgery Clinic at Vivantes Humboldt Hospital in Berlin, said in a statement.

Google's DeepMind has an app for patients seeking health data. It has also worked with the U.K. National Health Services to test its Streams AI app using information from those with acute kidney damage.

Intel just invested in Lumiata, which uses AI to find at-risk patients. Its Risk Matrix is an advanced predictive tool that calculates an individual's likely future health state based on associated clinical conditions or diagnoses.

"To deliver on the promise of value-based care, the industry desperately needs next-generation tools that can leverage the volume of health data that exists today, make sense of its complexity, and provide personalized, actionable, real-time insights," said Ash Damle, CEO and founder of Lumiata. "The Risk Matrix uses our medical AI engine to surface the most important insights in ways that fundamentally change the approach and economics of care management. It is a tool that can move us toward a world where health can be predicted with precision and speed."

GE Healthcare has begun to use AI for its medical imaging, medical diagnostics and patient monitoring systems. In May, it teamed up with Partners HealthCare in a ten-year arrangement designed to incorporate AI tools for population health, pathology and genomics. It is also working with Harvard hospitals to use AI to find abnormalities in scans – a potential boon to the radiological community.

“The fundamental thing that’s changing in medicine, above everything else, is that we are literally inundating our clinicians with data of all kinds, as medicine becomes more sophisticated,” Dr. David Torchiana, CEO of Partners HealthCare, said at the time. “Rather than enhancing the quality of care, sometimes it seems to complicate and render care more difficult and more confusing.”

At present, BIS noted that North America is the leader in the AI market, while the Asia Pacific region has seen the fastest growth of developments and innovations.